Many studies investigated the psychological impact of lockdown measures on the general population, while few studies focused on the psychiatric population. This study aimed to investigate the role of therapeutic communities in the management and containment of symptoms of patients with psychosis living in psychiatric residential facilities. Data were collected at two different points: November 2019 (Coronavirus disease 19 had not yet spread) and April 2020 (during the lockdown in Italy). Twenty-two study participants were recruited from three residential accredited psychiatric facilities. During lockdown, the patients showed a small increase in symptomatology in terms of emotional isolation. In addition, it was been observed significant differences in certain functional areas of the behavior, measured as lower inclination towards violent behaviors during lockdown, and higher scores in substance abuse and medical impairment. The lockdown condition could represent a form of containment; daily routines, along with adequate social support, are important aspects of the stability and the level of behavioral functioning of psychiatric patients. Social support and continuity of care offered by psychiatric communities can be an effective safeguard against the psychological impact of the COVID-19 epidemic.

Despite the existence of a variegated literary tradition and the almost complete absence of field research on the subject, the notion of utopia in the Muslim world is generally associated with an ‘Islamic utopia’ that aims to reinstate the societal model of early Muslims. Based on ethnographic research among young Italian-Bangladeshis, this article suggests that ‘retro-utopia’ and religious repertoires more generally do not represent the only resources used by young people to imagine social change. The interlocutors put forth a variety of images of an ideal society that is ultimately structured according to a realism-messianism polarity. The youth use these images in an endeavor to make sense of their different positionalities and biographical trajectories, and the power relations experienced by themselves and the religious groups with which they are affiliated.

This article argues for a non-normative and pluralistic approach to the study of utopia among Muslim people. The authors employ the contributions to this special section as a starting point to redress a number of ethnocentric biases clouding the relationship between utopia and Islam. They criticize arguments that deny Muslims the ability to produce ‘genuine’ utopias, highlighting commonalities between a religious culture and the secular culture in the West that has endorsed the notion of utopia. At the same time, the contributors show how in scholarly research a normative and prejudicial concept of ‘Islamic utopia’ has obscured the variety of forms that utopianism assumes among Muslim people, particularly the youth. This article envisages an inductive approach that takes into account both the different positionalities from which the concepts of Islam and utopia are appropriated and the diverse political outcomes that are produced.

‘Our parents couldn’t teach us the true meaning of what spirituality and faith can be!’. This assertion, made by a 24-year-old youth, epitomises the critical stance of a group of young Italian-Bangladeshi Muslims towards the religiosity oftheir former generation. Based on ethnographic research in Rome (Italy), this article illustrates the apparently oxymoroniccharacteristics of a discourse of Muslimness which, despite stressing the importance of a return to the primary sources ofIslam, combines this attitude with a peculiar emphasis on ‘integration’. I will show how this counter-intuitive combinationis not only inspired by a scholarly concept of ‘European Islam’, but first and foremost it is grounded in the concrete lifeconditions of youths who are both well placed within the Italian society and animated by religious zeal. In this way, I seekto shed light on the mutual entanglement of religious stances and life experiences, and to point up the limits of‘exceptionalist’ and ‘literalist’ approaches to the study of Islam.

This special issue stems from a panel we organised at the European Conference on South Asian Studies in 2018, under the title ‘Banglascapes in Southern Europe: comparative perspectives’. Not all the panel participants from that conference feature in this special issue, and not all the authors included here were present at the conference. Nevertheless, the panel represents a first important moment in which we began to collect case-studies and insights on a relatively new aspect of the so-called Bengali, or Bangladeshi, ‘diaspora’.